924 A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE
Danish adventurer, privileged by a strange fate to be the one to
feel them there, with Geard's arch above him and Geard's plat-
form beside him.
He glanced up from that sea of pallid faces to the coping-
stone of the arch which had been rudely carved into a rough
resemblance of Dunstan of Baltonsborough. Baltonsborough it-
self was over there, hidden by the Tor, an abode of living people
still, and nearer him, beyond Edgarley, was Havyatt Gap, where
his own unsuperstitious Danes had been stopped by these mad
monks. Mad they were then; mad they were still; and old Geard
was the maddest of them all!
This stone, all these stones, ho<w much nobler was their long-
enduring life than the follies and fevers of men! Surrounded by
the great waters had they once been, by the tossing salt waves
of that free sea, over which the Viking ships had swept. Would
that some strong new flood might come up from its ocean-bed,
and sweep over all these morbid-legended fields! How he hated
them, these lies, these frauds, these illusions, which he had been
paid to propagate! And yet there was something about old Geard,
that seemed as much on his side as on the side of these mad
monks. Was Geard himself, secretly in his deep heart, as heathen
as he was? Was that black-draped empty platform only waiting
even now, for the lifting of some huge gonfalon of defiance to all
this? Was this opening of the man's Saxon arch into these Latin-
Celtic mysteries of Glastonbury, in reality a reversal of that
stopping of the Danes at Havyatt?
How well he remembered his own first entrance into the town,
more than ten months ago, in Mr. Evans' little motor car. Well!
Evans and he were both married men now; married and settled,
and far away from Stonehenge!
"I can't think where he is!" It was the beautiful Nancy address-
ing him again.
"How do / know," John replied peevishly. "He's probably
asleep in Wookey Hole, like he was last time, when Cousin
Philip shoved himself into his place. Why! Talk of the devil—
if there's not Philip himself, coming over here now!"
Nancy turned round and sure enough there was Philip Crow,